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Tuesday, 22 August 2017

After upgrading my Mini Kossel to a Mega Kossel, I was browsing Thingiverse for something interesting to test it with, I was searching the names of some of my favorite games, and Rawrbomb's Mass Effect: Andromeda Sidewinder design looked like one of the best modeled props from the game available.

Sidewinder V1 parts waiting for painting

Printing was fairly straightforward, most of the digital prep work was mostly just orienting the parts for printing with my Mega Kossel, the default orientations are optimized for a prusa i3 style machine, so I ended up sticking most of the parts on end with a large stack of support material. Final step before printing was choosing which parts to do in black or white, so most of the gun's frame is in white PLA with some of the details in black PLA. Total print time was 52 hours 41 minutes and used 369 grams of filament including the support material.

Sidewinder right side initial paintwork

For the painting, I started with the raw parts after removing the support material and gave some sections like the barrel and grip cages a coat of acrylic paint on all surfaces. Others sections got partially masked and painted in stages for the full effect, while others were left mostly untouched since the print was already the correct colour. For some of the detailing, I used coloured sharpies to prime the area, then 'weathered' the area, then recoloured with the sharpie again.

Sidewinder left side initial paintwork

This worked reasonably well, but after rewatching this YouTube video, I thought I could do better, especially as some of the weathering was only highlighting the layer lines in a few spots. So, after a quick trip to the local paint store to get some more colours and brushes, I repainted it to more closely follow the in-game texturing, with a little bit of rusting around the edges and seams. I've still got a bit of weathering to do at some point, but I'm very pleased with how it turned out.